Joyous news that the BBC are finally planning to release Tutti Frutti – John Byrne's wonderfully acerbic and funny TV drama from 1987 – on DVD later this summer. Quite why it has never been released before, despite repeated requests from the writer and the series' many fans, remains a mystery. When I interviewed Byrne in 2006, before the opening of his stage version of Tutti Frutti, he told me: "I've never been given a reason and I cannot fathom why. The truth is, nobody knows."

The series was broadcast and repeated just once, and various rumours have persisted as to why it was not issued on DVD. It was suspected that someone at the BBC had wiped the master tapes; that there was an issue over music rights; that there were contractual delays from one or more members of the cast, who wanted extra payment for a DVD release; and, most intriguingly, that a top BBC executive was irritated that Byrne wouldn't write a follow-up series, and not releasing Tutti Frutti was a sort of punishment.

But Byrne also told me the BBC knew he intended the drama (in six hour-long episodes) to be a one-off: "I left the characters at a point in their lives where all sorts of things could have happened, but I didn't want to drive the thing into the ground."

Tutti Frutti, which launched the TV careers of Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane and Richard Wilson, is a glorious, irreverent and scabrously funny story about the Majestics, a covers band who have just lost their lead singer, Big Jazza McGlone, in a kebab-related road accident. They have a silver jubilee tour booked and a TV documentary planned, so manager Eddie Clockerty (Wilson) hires McGlone's lookalike younger brother Danny (Coltrane) to fill his place.

The series follows the band as they play in insalubrious pubs and clubs in one depressing Scottish town after another, and Danny bumps into old flame Suzi Kettles (Thompson), who later joins them on tour. Back in Glasgow, the bone-dry Clockerty and his workshy secretary Miss Toner (Katy Murphy) snipe at each other in drippingly acidic exchanges that, for me at least, are the show's highlight.

Tutti Frutti works on so many levels: a pitch-perfect satire about faded talent and inflated egos in the music industry, a scathing assessment of how Scotland's industrial towns were laid waste by Thatcherism, and a tender portrayal of the unusual love stories between Danny and Suzi and Clockerty and Miss Toner. For Byrne, it was "about rock'n'roll and the part it played in the lives of that generation". Most of all, though, it's a damned near perfect comedy.